ukiyo-e means 'Pictures of the Floating World'. Images of everyday Japan, mass-produced for popular consumption in the Edo period (1615-1868), they represent one of the highpoints of Japanese cultural achievement. Popular themes include famous beauties and well-known actors, renowned landscapes, heroic tales and folk stories.
namazu-e
In November 1855, the Great Ansei Earthquake struck the city of Edo (now Tokyo), claiming 7,000 lives and inflicting widespread damage. Within days, a new type of color woodblock print known as namazu-e (lit. "catfish pictures") became popular among the residents of the shaken city. These prints featured depictions of mythical giant catfish (namazu) who, according to popular legend, caused earthquakes by thrashing about in their underground lairs. In addition to providing humor and social commentary, many prints claimed to offer protection from future earthquakes.
nishiki-e
Previously, most prints had been in black-and-white, coloured by hand, or coloured with the addition of one or two colour ink blocks. A nishiki-e print is created by carving a separate woodblock for every colour, and using them in a stepwise fashion. An engraver by the name of Kinroku is credited with the technical innovations that allowed so many blocks of separate colours to fit together perfectly on the page, in order to create a single complete image.
senso-e
Senso-e are woodblock prints with war scenes from the Meiji period, especially from the Sino-Japanese (1894/95) and Russo-Japanese (1904/05) war. Senso-e were a big business during the Sino-Japanese war. These woodblock prints were meant as newspaper illustrations from the war front.
sumo-e
Sumo-e are images of sumo wrestlers and sumo fights. Such images have been popular during all centuries of Japanese woodblock printmaking. The subject is popular even among contemporary Japanese printmakers. In the 1980s the Japan Sumo Wrestling Association commissioned a series of sumo-e to Daimon Kinoshita, born 1946.
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